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Set Your Sights on Retargeting

What happens when a customer visits your site, shows some interest in your products or services, and then splits without converting? Are they gone forever? That is up to you. By using remarketing you can gently beckon them back to your website by reminding them of the items they showed previous interest in. What is this internet magic? Remarketing (sometimes called “retargeting”) works by using deliciously helpful internet cookies. In tech speak, “cookies” are totally harmless bits of code that latch on to users as they surf the web to record basic browsing data, history, and settings. Thanks to these cookies, you do not have to reenter your search settings each time you use Google or input your Facebook password whenever you head back to look at your newsfeed.

Retargeting ads work by using the tracking data collected by cookies and serving them a completely personalized advertisement. Talk about speaking directly to your audience! With these types of ads, there’s no worry about where to place them or what the exact message should be. These ads piggyback on the Google Display Network, which covers a huge portion of the web. This means your ads will display virtually wherever your visitors navigate to on the web, and the message can change depending on which of your products they clicked on, viewed, or even left abandoned in an e-commerce shopping cart.

The greatest news is that this type of online advertising is not just for the big dogs. Any business, no matter how small, can take part in this type of digital advertising. While it may not be something we recommend for beginners, the monthly budget is drastically less than what you would typically pay for an ongoing Google Adwords campaign. The reason behind this is that only people who visited your website will see these ads. You only pay for the people who see and click on your ads as well. While this means that your ads will be shown to far less people, the people who do see your ad will be highly targeted and much more likely to convert, due to their previous exposure to your brand and the personalized nature of remarketing ads. Instead of shotgunning your ad out for everyone and their mother to see, this targeted approach can lead to a much higher conversion rate than almost any other type of digital ad strategy.

The frequency of your ads has a huge impact on how effective they are. As we’ve stressed before, it takes up to 8-9 touches for a customer to trust your brand and commit their hard earned dollars to your product. This is another key benefit of retargetting ads, they display on everyone’s favorite time suck: Facebook. Retargeting ads can be set up to appear both as a featured news feed item, as well as an advertising block on the right side of users’ newsfeeds. By becoming fully integrated with Facebook advertisements, it’s really like you’re getting two campaigns in one. We love dual campaigns.

So how is this all set up? Like we mentioned before, retargeting campaigns are not something we recommend as a DIY marketing project. To setup a complete campaign, you first need to compile about 12 different display ad creatives of varying sizes. This is due to the vast array of pages and places your ad could end up during your campaign. While you could opt for less than the required, you really must develop an ad for each possible placement to get the maximum power behind your campaign. Once the creatives are done, it’s off to the races. The ads are submitted into the remarketing system and a simple snippet of tracking code is installed onto the pages of your website.

Of course, you can never just “set and forget” with any digital marketing campaign. From the initial setup, progress can be monitored via a robust analytics system, and conversions can be tracked to provide the ROI results of the campaign.

So thanks to retargeting, you’re able to get inexpensive yet highly targeted ads to buyers with known interest AND the ability to track results – how do you like them cookies?